Telecommunications and the Internet

Big businesses spend massive amounts to create demand for their products and services. Why should this increased demand threaten to collapse our telecommunications infrastructure? (Dec. 23, Communication breakdown and the 'World Wide Wait').

In the case of the Internet, where there is great demand, telecommunications companies smell money. Do they imagine that during a gold rush we actually "hear" gold. If the Internet is a gold rush, it is not the gold diggers who will make money; the money is in selling the hardware to the gold diggers. Pans, pickaxes, food, etc.

In Brazil it was bush pilots who got rich during the Amazon gold rush. Flying the providing equipment in the case of telecommunications is where the money will be! Those in the telecommunications industry should act as the bush pilot of the Internet gold rush.

Assume the average Internet subscriber uses his telephone for an hour a day. From his viewpoint, and that of Internet service providers, the switches and trunks interconnecting them lay dormant for 23 hours a day. An underutilized asset. The Internet's beauty is its intelligence when not in use. It is a parasite that uses telephone networks' idle time. It threatens to bring down our telephone network, when switches are engineered for an average call of three minutes and an average Internet call lasts half an hour.

Why should an Internet call go through a switch designed for voice calls? ISDN is an efficient technology that lets you access at 128 Kbit/s, with digital transmission straight from your computer to the Internet provider. It combines voice and data at your home and forwards it to the switch; before getting into it, the data is stripped out, sent to a data network and the voice is sent to the switch to route it through.

Suppose the high speed ISDN creates a bottleneck somewhere else. We throw bandwidth at it (excuse the jargon). There is SDH, ATM and Frame Relay. We are not talking about an airline to fly people -- we are talking about shuttling goods during a gold rush. If telecommunications operators act as bush pilots there will be no collapse of our infrastructure. I have heard of no gold digger in the Amazon without drinks, food and entertainment.

OSVALDO COELHO

Bandung, West Java